As of now, lockpicking and disarming are fairly limited, being rarely seen in a finite ammount of zones. I propose making this aspect of the mud more abundant.

First my idea is having 1 mob in a experience zones and boss mobs from zones carry a locked/trapped chest, coffer, box and pother random containers. some examples: 1 on miplit on the ship, 1 on the ancient druid in DS, 1 on 3rd floor monastary, random load on cardie orcs, random loads on brimir, thrym, loki.. pretty much random on any mob.

Then once you've xped for 2 hours or whatever, you will probably have something like 30 boxes. if you have a rogue to pick them, great, if not you head back to your town to find where all the rogues mass and get one of them to help for a part of the reward or none of you're just cheap.

after that and the box is in the rogue's hand, it should be examined for traps. The rogues intelligence and wisdom would come into play, returning a few messages of what he thinks is going on. (better messages for smarter rogues!)

then if a trap is found, disarming. I think a change here is necessary. right now you just spam detect and disarm trap till you've found it and disarmed it, but i propose examine show the trap to be 90 difficulty lock, and 50 difficulty trap (out of 100). This would be the guildline to show what you need to roll more than to successfully pick and disarm the box. and then when you actually use your skill, you see what you rolled out of 100.

This way you can see which lockpicks are more diserable and create a new need for lockpicks other than mithril lockpicks. along with that another idea to go along with this is that adding in minor details like kneeling before disarming and detecting that would give a bonus to your skill.

Also, please revamp the current messages for these skills. They could be changed to be more detailed and give the player more of a feel for detecting/disarming/picking.

rewards:
i dont really care what they are but atleast have them somewhat desireable so that there is a need to open these boxes. i suggest sellable gems and whatever

i played gs3 :p. anyhow, i realize this is a complete rip but i bring up a good point that our detect/disarm stuff is pretty oudated and boring and i wanted to suggest a way to make it not utterly boring

also i think aldira highlighted this best. A lot of things in sojourn dont show a reward, so the player never knows if what he is doing is actually rewarding. Such as the current lockpick, disarm system. (one of his post was basically about him not being able to know if his singing was rewarding other than heal song whereas damage dealing classes, healing classes, and enchanting classes can see a visible difference in what they're class was made to do).

Please upgrade rogues. They are so underpowered as it is now. Please give them spells like heal, moonwell and dragonscales. Can we please do SOMETHING to make rogues usefull? I'm tired of seeing so many rogues out of work and sitting at 1w. . .so very sad. They really are very underpowered. I think they need a third ability that kills a mob outright even if it isn't at 0 hps.

This reminds me of a story I read about someone's D&D campaign. When one member of the group was DMing, he filled his campaign world with boxes lying around that would either contain a trap or treasure. They would often be lying around in the middle of 4 way intersections for some reason and the party had to decide whether or not to mess with it. Well, after a few too many nasty traps, most of the party decided that it just wasn't worth it to mess with the things. Most. One player still loved them. He developed a habit of picking up the boxes, keeping them around, and then throwing them at a monster in case it was trapped. For a while anyway. That habit died off after helping the monsters a few too many times. I suppose giving the demon a +5 vorpal sword would sour anyone on that habit. Eventually he started recording which types of boxes blew up in his face and which produced treasure, which wound up making the boxes less lethal to himself.

So one day the group happens upon a box made of bone. Now, anyone in their right mind knows that you don't ever touch anything crafted from bone that isn't a primitive weapon or crude armor. It's kind of like how you never read a book that's bound in human skin. But players aren't always that smart so Mr. Box Lover opens it up anyway. The next thing you know, he's covered in a swarm of ravenous creatures that basically consist of two legs and a mouth which procede to chew up his armor, weapons, magic items, and his flesh. Every swing he makes kills a dozen or two of the critters, but that's not much when there are millions of them on you. He's finally forced to fireball himself to get rid of the things, after which he swears off boxes made of bone.

So the point of the story is that I'd love to see some of these boxes contain swarms of rogue and bard eating insects. Or flesh eating bacteria. I mean, everyone loves flesh eating bacteria, right?

On a more serious note, there is something like this in Star Wars Galaxies. Occasionally an NPC will drop a locked container when killed, which can only be opened by members of the smuggler profession. What typically winds up happening is that people wind up with a ton of these things in their inventory until they're relaxing in town when a smuggler shouts that they're opening containers for free, after which a small line forms. Eventually you get your container back if the opening was successful (there's only a 50% chance of success from what I've been told), after which you get to wonder why someone would bother locking up a newbie weapon and a melon. Most people I know don't bother getting the things opened since they're short on inventory space and just use the locked containers as house decorations since they look like high tech trash cans. Smugglers themselves operate on a loss since the tools needed to open locks require resources to construct.

All in all, it's just tedium for the most part, though I've gotten one thing I didn't junk from a container. So again, I reiterate that some of these containers should have rogue eating microrganisms to make it more interesting than how it is in SWG if this idea is ever implemented. I suppose rogue eating macrorganisms would work to, but like melons and newbie weapons, I don't know why anyone would ever bother locking one of those in a box.